


what was found is lost again

by herwhiteknight



Category: RWBY
Genre: Angst, F/F, One-Sided Attraction, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 10:19:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19060672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/herwhiteknight/pseuds/herwhiteknight
Summary: There’s no mission left here now, there’s no reason beyond a heart that wanted more than could be granted. There’s just a broken girl who wants more than anything to go back to the moment she lost, and confess the things she left behind.





	what was found is lost again

**Author's Note:**

> This is not at all a happy fic, and I'm sorry for that. Had some feels that needed be released. It's also all over the place, whoopsies.

Ilia swore up and down the moment she met Blake that she was, in fact, the girl of her dreams. Driven, passionate, fierce.. just the right amount of righteous anger and low-burning vengeance. A training partner that pushed her to her limits in a way that no one else could ever begin to even _hope_ to match. She made Ilia’s blood race, and she wasn’t going to be shy about the fact that it was racing in more than one way under the cover of night.

But she hesitated too long, allowed her gaze to linger instead of pierce, and Blake’s eyes were drawn elsewhere other than towards Ilia’s soft smiles. It’s always something Ilia wishes she could take back, something she wishes to transform. Not the way that Adam took Blake, not ever the way that Adam transformed her, moulded her, made her a shadow of her fiery self. She would change the moment into something beautiful, something new, something she’d only ever dreamed about.

“I’d take you back to the moment I fell in love with you,” Ilia murmured to herself, watching Adam walk away from the compound’s perimeter with Blake shadowing him. Always shadowing him. “I’d take you back and I’d tell you. I wouldn’t let you go until you knew.”

But time changed them both, changed them all and their paths diverged. Adam into a successor, Blake into a renegade and Ilia the one who was certain to make it right once again. Back to innocence and instinct and the hope that their fates would still be interwoven at the end of the cataclysm.

So now she sits, Adam’s deranged spy, hating every second of where she stood on the wrong side of history, with Blake’s blade pointing right at her heart. “Why did you come _back_ , Ilia?” Blake hisses at her, and Ilia fights the skin that wants to turn cold with despair.

“I had to,” she grits out, leaning up slightly from where she’d been knocked prone, chancing the sharp edge of Gambol Shroud. And praying that the girl she fell in love with, the one who cared for Ilia deeply, would still be found beneath the face of a traitor.

“ _Why?_ ” Blake asks, the venom the same, but the pressure pulls back. _Still there,_ Ilia catches herself thinking, daring to sit up further. _I knew you could never hurt me._

“I had to know if what he was saying was true,” Ilia says, and allows herself to crack, blue creasing the worried lines of her forehead, tinting the corners of her frown. “He said you were with _them_ now.”

Blake did nothing to react to Ilia’s small mention of Adam - because there would be none else speaking powerful enough words to shake even the strongest convictions. And Blake had always knows Ilia to be driven. Strong-willed. Passionate. But at the rest of Ilia’s words, Blake could only nod. “If you could only _see_ Ilia-”

“I’ve seen _enough_!” she snaps back, flashing red as she rises like the crack of lightning creating fire. “I’ve seen you with - with _her_.”

And again, there’s no mention of a name, but an intimate understanding passes between them. Ilia shakes the feeling that this was the connection they used to have, that if it’s still there, then there’s a _chance_ -

But it burns. Ash rises to the sky. And Blake’s next word does well enough to choke them both. “Yang,” she says, and it’s devastatingly simple. All of Ilia’s implanted fury, pressed and branded into her by a masked demon, crumbles.

“ _Why?”_ Ilia begs plainly, and it’s her turn. Her turn to ask, her turn to wonder, her turn to hurt. There’s no mission left in this word now, there’s no reason beyond a heart that wanted more than could be granted. There’s just a broken girl who wants more than anything to go back to the moment she lost, and confess the things she left behind.

Blake’s blade drops to the ground, the tip cutting a clean line in the hard packed earth as the hilt dangles loosely in her grip. She’s completely at Ilia’s mercy now, who still has a shaking grip pointed at Blake’s heart. Yet somehow, there’s no danger save for the imminent threat of memories.

They’re just as painful as weapons.

“I couldn’t stay with the White Fang once I’d realized what Adam had become! I tried to convince you to run with me, but you-” Blake starts, misinterpreting the betrayal.

Ilia can’t help but choke on a bitter laugh. “Sometimes you can be _so stupid_ ,” she finishes with the dregs of her laughter.

“Ilia-”

And it’s her name falling from the lips she wanted as her own that makes everything collapse. “I _loved_ you!” she shouts, and her finger tightens on the trigger. But it’s her words that she wants to use as bullets, because hateful as the sight of Blake is to her right now, a world that heart would be nothing. “I loved you and you _left_ me! When you - when we talked in the dark about how he was changing, what he was becoming.. I’d thought maybe there would be.. _something._ But you left him too. You left for _them._ For her. And worst of all? I.. _let_ you. Because I thought you’d come back. To me.”

There’s a ringing silence in the air, the kind of silence that follows violence. Her gun is still loaded, but from the expression on Blake’s face, it’s as if her chest was riddled with shrapnel. It hurts to even look at, so Ilia turns away, imagines that gunpowder and smoke blocks her vision and waits.

When Blake finally speaks, she has wounds to inflict of her own. “I could _never_ come back, Ilia,” she says, and her words aren’t catastrophic. They’re insidious. Subtle, like a thin knife in the back, a wound dealt with the intention of discovery just when the moment is too late. “You saw what he was becoming. What he was turning _our people_ into. It wasn’t just _wrong_ , it would’ve been deadly. He had to be stopped.”

“You left _our people_ for _humans_ , Blake! If you’d just listen to me-”

“You could’ve come with me Ilia,” Blake says, the edge returning to her voice as Gambol Shroud lifts clear of the dirt. “That night, when I’d asked you run, we could’ve escaped together.”

“It’s too late for all that now,” Ilia says bitterly, steadying her grip in response. “Adam has plans for the White Fang that you couldn’t even begin to imagine, much less stop.”

Blake’s guard falls one last time, and Ilia knows it’s a last ditch effort to learn Adam’s secrets, to put an end to the inevitable. “It’s not too late _now_ , Ilia,” she pleads, holding out a hand. “We can fix all this.”

Ilia thinks for a split second - _it could be that easy. Leaving the White Fang. Leaving Adam’s twisted control. Leaving it all behind to start over. With Blake._ But then she thinks about the chance she missed before, the mistakes she made to set her on this path, the words she didn’t speak. She doesn’t need to think much more to know that she’s too far gone. Redemption’s out of reach. “Maybe _you_ can. But it will be without me.” The words burn acrid on her tongue and she tastes lead, feels shrapnel.

“Goodbye Blake,” she whispers, then shoots at her feet. Everything is devoured by smoke, and Ilia’s gone.


End file.
